This is what happened in baseball over the last week/this weekend:
NL Central
You generally don’t want to lose eight straight games, but that’s what the Brewers—long baseball’s surest thing thsi year when it came to the division races—did, finally snapping the streak yesterday with a 4-1 win in Washington. Thankfully for Milwaukee, the NL Central was doing NL Central things during the streak—the Cardinals were swept by the Rays to open the week, and at one point this weekend the Reds’ active two-game losing streak was the best the whole division could offer—but still, they now trail St. Louis by half a game while Brandon Woodruff, Freddy Peralta, and Kolten Wong all reside on the injured list.
We said back before Peralta was hurt that the Brewers had, for a change, the depth to handle something like that, but the issues are mounting, and the Cardinals aren’t going away. Making matters worse, while the Brewers are habitually aggressive in trades, the Cardinals are trying to win this too. The Brewers are better on paper right now, but that might not necessarily last, and just another game or two in the gap could flip the Cardinals into favoritehood.
NL West
Out in California, the Dodgers gave up a game and a half of ground to the Padres over the week and opened the door for a struggling Giants team, a struggling Giants team which is struggling no more after sweeping their rivals this weekend by the Bay. Walker Buehler left Friday’s game with an elbow issue, and that elbow issue turns out to be significant. Strained flexor tendon. The word is that he’ll be back to throwing in August at the earliest, and he’d have to build back up from there.
One thing with this that could add some humor? If this provokes the Dodgers to trade for a big arm at the deadline, and then Buehler does come back strong, their playoff rotation could be even better than it would have otherwise been. Narrow possibility, but a real one.
AL Central
The Twins navigated a week of visits from the Yankees and Rays, ending the six games an even 3-3, and while the Guardians did close the gap to three games, the bigger threat—the White Sox—floundered, with calls for Tony La Russa’s firing growing louder by the day.
Dampening spirits for the Twins, Royce Lewis is out for the year with a partial ACL tear, but in the lens of this year and this year only, he was originally something of a luxury. Making matters worse for the White Sox, Michael Kopech left the first inning yesterday with an issue in his right knee that, though cleared by an MRI, is concerning. The White Sox get Lance Lynn back today, but Lance Lynn’s been out a long time. There’s uncertainty there. Kopech may not miss a turn in the rotation, but if he does, and if Lynn’s return doesn’t go all that well, it’ll be yet another setback for a team that just can’t find its groove so far this year.
Meanwhile, the Tigers’ top-paid pitcher, Eduardo Rodriguez, is going on the restricted list. It’s unclear what’s happening there—that’s the nature of the restricted list—but hopefully everyone is ok.
AL East
The Yankees continued to roll, climbing to a 10-1 record on the month of June as they took two of three in Minneapolis before sweeping the hapless Cubs. They did, however, only gain a game on the Blue Jays and Rays and half a game on the Red Sox, and while all those teams are eight and a half games back or worse, there’s a lot of season left, with the Blue Jays boasting a particularly strong roster.
AL West
The Astros struggled at home against Seattle and Miami, and it doesn’t really matter. FanGraphs’s Playoff Odds have Houston more than 95% likely to win the West. They’re nine games up on an Angels team that’s four games below .500 and just fired their manager. The Rangers and Mariners are right there with the Angels, but compared to where the Yankees are at? All three Yankee challengers are better on paper than all three Astro challengers. This is why, per FanGraphs, the Astros are the current World Series favorites.
NL East
For the Nationals, Stephen Strasburg’s going back on the IL after his season debut went badly. He evidently felt “discomfort” during a bullpen session today, which could point in a variety of directions. Want to play the how-old-is-Stephen-Strasburg game?
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Stephen Strasburg is 33.
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On the individual side, the nine best players of the week by fWAR:
- Byron Buxton, firmly in load management mode for Minnesota due to his injury history, homered five times in a three-game stretch from Wednesday through Friday. He has seventeen long balls so far this year, just three away from setting a career high.
- 30-year-old A’s normally-a-catcher Christian Bethancourt, who before this year hadn’t played in the Majors since a brief stint with the Padres in 2017, had a great series in Cleveland, going deep three times in four games while mostly manning first base.
- Marcus Semien also homered three times in Cleveland, though he did it all in a doubleheader on Tuesday. Cleveland went 5-2 on the week, so no harm, no foul?
- Mike Trout’s groin injury only kept him out of the lineup for three days, but even just playing half a week, he was among baseball’s most productive players, homering three times and doubling twice in what was for him a two-game stretch between Tuesday and Saturday.
- I don’t know if Jake Burger’s breaking out for the White Sox, but he did have a five-extra-base-hit week himself.
- I’m pretty confident Michael Taylor is not breaking out, but he homered twice for the Royals against Baltimore over the weekend.
- Like Trout, Carlos Correa didn’t play a full week, only returning from the Covid IL on Wednesday, getting the day off on Saturday, and still walking away with one of the most productive weeks in the game. I understand the draw for the Angels to pay so much money to so few players: It is nice to have one of the best in the game in your lineup.
- On the mound, Hunter Greene put things together a little bit, going seven scoreless against the Diamondbacks before allowing one run over five innings against the Cardinals. Twelve innings, fifteen strikeouts, two walks, three hits. Good week.
- Justin Verlander was also a two-start stud, striking out 17 while allowing just one earned run over fourteen innings of work between Tuesday and Sunday. Still got it at 39 years of age.
The Worst of Times Yet for the Cubs
It has been a bad season for the Cubs, and it’s only gotten worse. With this weekend’s sweep at the hands of the Yankees, the team that was in the playoff race for six straight years and part of a seventh is now thirteen games under .500, has lost six straight, and has in the last few days shown little worthy of excitement pertaining to the future.
To go chronologically through the weekend:
On Friday, the Cubs surprisingly designated Clint Frazier for assignment, effectively cutting the guy and setting off a lot of rage about the continued attachment to Jason Heyward. As a quick evaluation of this: The Heyward/Frazier split doesn’t make sense to me either, but the fact the Cubs are continuing to play Jason Heyward means something, and this particular move signifies that they think Heyward is more valuable than Frazier. Does that mean they think Heyward’s more valuable than Frazier right now? Not necessarily. But through some combination of mentorship and potential trade value, they prefer Heyward to Frazier.
I think the trade value thing is important here, because Frazier’s been lumped in as a “young guy” but is only under club control through 2024. He’s 27, so he’s got a few years left before age will start to become an immediate factor in his performance, but he’s also suffered some significant concussion injury, and the Cubs know him as an asset a lot better than we do. Is one extra year of Frazier worth enough to choose him over Heyward? Evidently not. Hopefully, for Frazier’s sake, they’re wrong about him. That said, it’ll really stink if he becomes something useful over the next two and a half seasons while Heyward flounders until his contract expires.
The one possible bad thing going on here, and I don’t think Jed Hoyer would think this way, so I’d imagine it would have to come from ownership, is that Heyward’s contract is not being viewed as a sunk cost. The Cubs aren’t set to spend enough this year or next year for Heyward’s contract to materially affect them on the margins, so even that tiny window where he maybe gets hot enough for them to deal him doesn’t make this thinking make sense. Hopefully the front office isn’t being told that they need to wring some value out of those dollars. That ship has sailed, and abandoning that thinking is one of the first lessons of basic microeconomic thought.
In other moves on Friday, Marcus Stroman was put on the IL with shoulder inflammation, Jonathan Villar and Yan Gomes each returned from the IL, Chris Martin returned from the bereavement-then-restricted list, and both Alfonso Rivas and Michael Rucker were optioned to AAA. Wade Miley returned to make his start on Friday night, but after three innings, he also left. Shoulder again. IL. Rucker came back. Rucker was a busy man this weekend. You haven’t seen the last of him in these notes.
After Miley left the game, the Cubs bullpen was nearly flawless, but the Cubs offense couldn’t scratch out more than a run. 13-inning 2-1 loss. That shouldn’t happen no matter how bad you are.
On Saturday, there were no illusions of competitive ability. Matt Swarmer gave up six home runs, Rucker gave up two, and the Cubs lost 8-0. After the game, Rucker was optioned to AAA yet again as Sean Newcomb returned from the IL, and it was good that he did that because the Cubs needed him yesterday when Keegan Thompson managed to get only two outs on 37 pitches. After Newcomb ate an inning and allowed five runs in the process, he has been designated for assignment himself. Eric Stout, a 29-year-old lefty, will replace him on both the 40-man and active rosters.
With Seiya Suzuki’s injury not getting better yet (the Cubs are going to give him a bit longer stay on the IL, thinking the finger needs to rest), Willson Contreras seemingly a sure thing to be traded, Kyle Hendricks missing in action (he’s still on the active roster, but he hasn’t pitched in nearly two weeks), Thompson back down to earth, and even Ian Happ’s name loud in trade speculation, it’s a bad time for the Cubbies. I will say, Thompson’s xERA is still just 3.91, which is solid for a guy fluctuating between roles. But man, thank goodness for Christopher Morel and Nico Hoerner. Bright spots amidst a lot of darkness.
The Cubs start a four-game set at Wrigley tonight against the Padres. Justin Steele opposes old friend Yu Darvish. I will confess to being a tad pessimistic.
The SEC Is Good at Baseball
In the college game, eight teams are going to the College World Series. More accurately, six are, and two will, with us finding out the other two this afternoon and tonight. So far, three of the six are SEC teams, two of the six are joining the SEC in the next few years, and Auburn is still in contention, with the first pitch at 6:30 tonight in Corvallis.
This is an element of college sports that probably goes unrecognized in all the NCAA transformation conversations. The SEC is good at baseball. It’s good at gymnastics. It’s good at track and field. It’s good at a lot of sports, and through the addition of Texas and Oklahoma—Oklahoma won the national championship in softball and gymnastics, Texas has won the national championship or been the runner up in roughly half its sports this year—it’s getting a lot better.
Sending teams to the College World Series is not a great one-year measurement of a conference’s baseball heft. The NCAA Tournament in baseball is a highly random affair, as Tennessee’s loss to Notre Dame illustrated so memorably. But no matter how you measure it, the SEC is good at baseball, and it’s good at a lot of other sports as well. Stanford and USC and Michigan and North Carolina all boast great athletic departments. But on a conference-wide level, across college sports as a whole, nothing really matches the SEC.
I don’t know if this is a parallel effect or if it’s a cause of the phenomenon, but ESPN broadcasts a lot of SEC competitions, through networks of its own name, through SEC Network, and through the ESPN+ streaming service. During waking hours, it feels that there is almost always a live SEC sporting event available for viewing, and the fact that makes financial sense for ESPN implies that there are people viewing these events, pulling us into a circular loop of seeing the interest these sports enjoy and the revenue they can generate. The SEC will not pull away from the NCAA because of football. Football already doesn’t really operate under the NCAA. If the SEC pulls away from the NCAA, it will be because it’s better, on the whole, at everything that isn’t football, too, and it has the fanbase willing to consume an explicitly regional competition. (I don’t know if the fanbase is actually willing to do that, but that would be the bet the SEC would be making should it split off. A more likely scenario is probably that the SEC eventually tries to poach Notre Dame, Stanford, USC, Ohio State, North Carolina, and other big national brands to cleave the best tenth of Division I away from the rest, with the question then being whether Missouri and South Carolina and others get dropped in the process.)
Lightning vs. Avalanche
On Saturday night, the expected happened, as a low-shot game ended with a series-deciding Tampa Bay victory. Steven Stamkos scored twice, firing in the ultimate winner just 21 seconds after the Rangers tied things up in the third. The Panthers may have faded, but in the end, it does seem the NHL is getting its two best teams opposing one another for the Stanley Cup, which is something that I think is good. Cinderella runs are fun, but they need to be an exception to be special.
More to Lose, More Likely to Win
Generally, the team with more to lose is the one that’s more likely to get the win. This isn’t cause and effect. It’s two sides of the same coin. Most of the time. When a team’s up 3-0, it’s a little different, and there are other exceptions, but the basic rule holds true for tonight’s Game 5 in San Francisco. The Warriors are the favorites, but they have a lot more to lose than the Celtics do.
The question heading into tonight is, as many have said, what the Celtics will do in response to Steph Curry’s eruption on Friday night, when he recorded a double-double, scored 43 points, and shot 50% from three. The thing about that question is that whatever the Celtics’ answer, Golden State has Andrew Wiggins, Klay Thompson, and Jordan Poole all capable of big scoring themselves, each coming off a slightly underwhelming Game 4 performance.
Game 4 was a joy, through and through. Boston took an early 11-4 lead, but until the closing seconds, the score never got wider than that seven-point gap. Hopefully tonight can live up to its predecessor’s standard.
Big 12 Transition Timing: Getting Clearer
The Big 12 will officially get UCF, Cincinnati, and Houston from the AAC after this coming academic year, making 2023-24 the first year with all four new Big 12 schools. It’s still possible Oklahoma and Texas will leave earlier than 2025, but at the moment, we’re set for two straight seasons of a 14-team Big 12.
Allen Lazard, Conrad Hawley
In convenient news for a blogger trying to check both “Packers” and “Iowa State Football” off his weekly to-include-in-the-notes list, Allen Lazard signed his RFA tender, ending a negotiation that saw him sit out minicamp but ultimately back down. Nice for the Packers to have that buttoned up, but it hadn’t gotten to be a problem yet.
On the basketball court, Iowa State picked up walk-on Conrad Hawley, a former quarterback at Kansas. I doubt Hawley ends up being more than a familiar face on the bench by next year’s end, but who knows? Iowa State’s among the more unpredictable college basketball programs at its level right now when it comes to personnel.
Transfer Wrap-Up?
With Courtney Ramey committing to Arizona and Jacob Grandison committing to Duke, only Pete Nance remains on the board as a five-star EvanMiya transfer with no gigantic question marks.
At the moment, the top five in EvanMiya’s Overall Transfer Activity metric—a measurement of the overall flow of transfer talent—goes, in order: Miami, Duke, Washington, Bryant, Gonzaga. Bryant, of course, is not like the others, but Miami and Washington are also far from Duke and Gonzaga in stature. There isn’t a convenient narrative of who the transfer portal helps and hurts, and that’s because we’re still learning, and it’s changing, and we’re going to keep learning and it’s going to keep changing. Right now, it’s more volatile, but that’s to be expected when something changes seismically. This aspect of it doesn’t mean the thing is good or bad, either. It can be good, and it can be bad, and this is not why (but I do think it’s good, for reasons completely separate from this).
Trackhouse: One of NASCAR’s Big Boys
With Daniel Suárez grabbing his first career victory yesterday, both Trackhouse drivers are effectively locked into the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, with the team now the most serious new-blood challenger to the Hendrick/Joe Gibbs/Penske triumvirate since Stewart-Haas surged to prominence more than a decade ago.
The result of this, competitively, is that the Playoff bubble is an intriguing place. The top four winless drivers—Ryan Blaney, Martin Truex Jr., Christopher Bell, and Aric Almirola, in order—are 4th, 6th, 10th, and 11th in points respectively, with 12th-place Kevin Harvick currently the first driver outside of the field, seven points back of Almirola but 28 points back of Bell, who would become the last man in should another driver behind them (Tyler Reddick, Austin Dillon, Erik Jones, Bubba Wallace, others) grab their first win of the year. Stewart-Haas has Chase Briscoe locked in, and comfortably so, leading three other winners in points with ten races left in the effective regular season, so it’s not like that whole team could miss the field, but Harvick missing it is borderline likely at this point, which is startling given how dominant he was for so much of 2020. Also noteworthy is that despite his two wins making him Playoff-safe, Denny Hamlin is just 21st in points. Strange year for a strange guy.
If ranking the teams’ collective performances this year, Hendrick Motorsports would still be first. Chase Elliott leads the standings, all four Hendrick drivers have a win, and none are at any risk of being bumped should there be 17 winners (Alex Bowman is 9th in the standings with one win, William Byron is 8th with two wins). Behind them, Joe Gibbs Racing is still second-best, with all four drivers in Playoff position and three in the top ten in points. From there, though, is it Penske, or is it Trackhouse? Ryan Blaney’s 4th and Joey Logano’s 5th, but Ross Chastain is 2nd and has more wins than those two combined, while Suárez leads Austin Cindric by four points. Overall, it’s probably Penske, but it sure is close.
Motorsports & Our Bets
We lost all three of our motorsports bets on the weekend, one in interesting fashion, one in hopeful fashion, and one in dreadful fashion (the “full of dread” definition on that one, not “bad”).
In F1, Sergio Pérez did have the faster car in qualifying, as we banked on happening, and he even beat Charles Leclerc off the starting line, but Max Verstappen had the faster car in the race, and his team was unwilling to risk disaster by letting the two compete with one another. That last part is probably worth considering with F1 bets. It’s risky to bet on team’s beta drivers.
In IndyCar, it looked for a moment like Marcus Ericsson could pull off the late comeback, but Josef Newgarden was too fast and Ericsson had a bad break on pit road that may or may not have made the difference. As with NASCAR, we tried picking a medium-odds driver whose starting position on the road course outpaced their odds, and one with some historic reason for belief. No dice, but it did look like a smart play to our eyes as things settled down.
In NASCAR, we were panicking. We’d openly passed up Chris Buescher and Michael McDowell at what I believe was 50-to-1 for Buescher and what I know was 66-to-1 for McDowell, and then each was in the picture at the end. That is the risk of going with a medium-odds driver. You’ll see the long-odds ones, and you’ll turn them down, and if one of them wins you will be beside yourself.
All things to think about. MLB futures portfolio’s looking great, so still feeling decent about our chances to be back profitable around Halloween.
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Viewing schedule, today/tonight, second screen rotation in italics:
- 4:00 PM EDT: UConn @ Stanford, Game 3 (ESPN2)
- 7:00 PM EDT: Marlins @ Phillies, Alcántara vs. Nola (ESPN+/MLB TV)
- 7:30 PM EDT: Auburn @ Oregon State, Game 3 (ESPN2)
- 8:05 PM EDT: Padres @ Cubs, Darvish vs. Steele (MLB TV)
- 9:00 PM EDT: Celtics @ Warriors, Game 5 (ABC)
